He nearly brought the cogs of Congress to a halt in 2013 over the Affordable Care Act, and now the Texas senator and GOP presidential hopeful is in the market for health insurance for his wife, Heidi, while he’s on the campaign trail. This is a bit awkward.

This should come as no surprise: The Republican U.S. senator from Texas will throw his hat in the ring as a contender for the White House in the 2016 election. Two of his advisers say he will make the announcement Monday.

The strangling of our political potential by a claustrophobic sense of the possible did not always typify American public life. My book is about that change in the temper of the times, and is in part motivated by my own experience.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: We revisit some of our favorite interviews from the past year. Topics include: war powers, banned books, the Koch brothers and the incredible journey of veteran turned pacifist Rory Fanning.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: We revisit some of our favorite interviews from the past year. Topics include: war powers, banned books, the Koch brothers and the incredible journey of veteran-turned-pacifist Rory Fanning.

How often will President Obama come to House Speaker John Boehner’s rescue even when Republican leaders aren’t willing to give much in return? And does the president want to preside over a split in his party?

Tuesday’s crushing defeat of the centrist Clinton/Obama Democratic Party provides an opening for the American left. The next few years are not going to be pretty, but they could be the beginning of something beautiful.

The missing component in the machinery of American politics has been moderate-to-liberal Republicanism, and the gears of government are grinding very loudly. You wonder if Kansas and Alaska have come up with a solution to this problem.

The short-term future of politics in the nation’s capital will be determined in large part by which party ends up in control of the Senate. But for a sense of the long-term future of politics in the country as a whole, watch the governors’ races.

There is at least one future event that could be safely forecast years ago, almost as soon as President Barack Obama entered the White House: a movement among House Republicans to impeach the president.

In a Salon review Sunday of Ralph Nader’s spring 2014 book “Unstoppable,” Bill Curry, former White House counselor to President Bill Clinton, takes Democrats led by Clinton and Barack Obama to task for making their party an indentured servant of Wall Street and gifting economic populism to the right.

A study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame teased out a positive correlation between educational segregation, which can relate to other divisive factors but isn’t always interchangeable with them, and alignment with tea party ideology.

In a time when corporate culture has marginalized our artists and those of compassion and vision, two such people merged for a moment at a Boston church. (Shown here, Michael Milligan in his one-man play.)

Until the run-up to the 2010 congressional elections, Daniel Schulman—like much of America—had barely heard of Charles and David Koch, billionaire industrialists who were primary backers of the tea party and were determined to take down President Obama.

Barring the increasingly influential isolationist/tea party wing of the American electorate, opinion is and always has been that the United States is the messenger of democracy to a world that usually hasn’t earned it and probably doesn’t deserve it.

When the flags fly proudly on the Fourth of July, I remember what my late father taught me about love of country. Much as he despised the scoundrels and pretenders he liked to call “jelly-bellied flag flappers,” after a line in a favorite Rudyard Kipling story, he was deeply patriotic.

Here’s one political paradox: A substantial majority of Americans do not fit neatly into the conventional “liberal” and “conservative” boxes, yet there is no coherent political center. Those who dream of a middle-of-the-road third party are destined to be disappointed.

A number of new studies and analyses are indicating that Americans, who once chose neighborhoods that reflected their own ethnicity and religion, are now moving to places where they feel ideologically comfortable—a development that will make American politics even more polarized than it already is.

Salon columnist Thomas Frank explains House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s surprising loss to a tea party primary challenger last week as “part of a long-running and basically unchanging Republican melodrama. …An eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved.”

Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists discuss House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s unexpected loss to a tea party challenger. The National Review’s Rich Lowry calls it “one of the most stunning upsets any of us have ever witnessed.” Scheer says the defeat is “a response to pain” in the region. And what should the U.S. do as Sunni insurgents advance in Iraq?